Offering a conservative counterbalance to the extreme left-coast liberalism of The Huffington Post

Friday, May 8, 2009

DON'T BE FOOLED BY THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD IN WASHINGTON; ONE MAN'S TORTURE IS ANOTHER MAN'S VISIT TO DISNEYWORLD

I have refrained from commentingon the whole theatre of the absurdwhich has been playing in the Washingtonand the main-stream-mediafor too many weeks nowbecause I cannot believe that intelligent peopleare not by this time be awareof the liberal game plan which is to distract the American peoplefrom what is happening to their Country in the Obamanationby portraying George W. Bush and his administration as modern day Torqemadas,the Inquisition brought back to life.

If a person with only a high school education would read the Justice Department memos, which of course they would not because they are not readily available to the general public, that person would understand that the “Advanced Interrogation” methods used by our military intelligence personnel people does not come anywhere near real torture.

If there is truth in the old saying that “beauty lies in the eye of the beholder” or “in the ear of the listener” then even more so it is true that torture is either real (as it was practiced by the Japanese in World War II, Elizabethan England, Inquisitional Spain, and countless other tyrannies throughout human history) or it is a figment of the individual’s imagination as in the case of Monty Python’s “Spanish Inquisition Sketch.”

The moral sin of torture consists in the inducing of physical or mental pain such that the subject individual suffers true temporary or permanent damage to their psyche or body and it is a sin against the dignity of the human person

Given the infinite variety of fears and phobias present more or less in every culture and in every human being, one man’s discomfort is another man’s torture. I have a fear of spiders and I am amazed that some people enjoy handling them. The threat of being buried in a pig skin might be torture for a Muslim, but of no concern to a pig farmer.

I am convinced that nothing even beginning to approach torture was practiced at Guantanomo or anywhere else under U.S. control during the Bush administration.Do not let the theatre of the absurd playing now in Washington disturb you. It is a distraction. Something to keep your attention away from the persistent erosion of our Constitution in the Obamanation.

I append three articles, one by Frank Turek (Politically Correct Torture) and two byAnn Coulter (Watching MSNBC Is Torture) (Muslims: We Do That on First Dates) which I urge you to read.

Is waterboarding torture? If it is, we’ve been torturing our service members for years. As a United States Naval Aviator, I attended SERE school in the California desert in 1985. SERE (which stands for Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape) prepares combatants for the possibility that they might be taken prisoners of war.

While many aspects of the training remain classified, I can say that we received treatment far more challenging and uncomfortable than anything the terrorists ever experienced at Gitmo or Abu Grab. As has been reported elsewhere, waterboarding was common at SERE school as it was in my class. It was done to help us resist giving up sensitive information in the event we were interrogated by the enemy. SERE is probably the most impactful training I’ve ever experienced.

Now, despite decades of its use on American service members, President Obama declares that waterboarding is torture when used on terrorists. Is it? Reasonable people cannot disagree whether scalding a person’s skin, dismembering him, or beheading him constitutes torture. Those are undeniably torturous acts that our enemies have inflicted on Americans. But since waterboarding leaves no permanent physical damage, reasonable people can disagree over whether or not it’s actually torture and should be used on terrorists. I’ll address that question in a future column.

What I’d like to address in this column is the shocking inconsistency of the President’s position. Despite being against waterboarding, President Obama does not seem to think that scalding, dismembering, or beheading is torture in all circumstances. In some circumstances, the President actually approves of such treatment, so much so that he is now exporting it to other countries with our tax dollars. He’s even thinking of forcing certain Americans to inflict it on the innocent.

In fact, the President along with most in his party and some in the Republican Party, think that such brutality is a Constitutional right, which they cleverly disguise with the word “choice.” Choice in these circumstances actually means scalding, dismembering, or de-braining a living human being—which is literally what saline, D&C, and partial birth abortions respectively accomplish. (Before anyone labels me an “extremist” for making this point, realize that I’m just factually describing what these procedures literally do. In my opinion, the “extremists” are those who deny these verifiable truths.)

The President might say that the comparison doesn’t work because we’re not sure about the humanity of the unborn. He said as much in the Rick Warren debate when he declared that the question of life’s beginning was “above his pay grade.” Well, if there’s any doubt about when life begins, shouldn’t you err on the side of caution and protect what may be a human being? If you’re not sure whether the rustling in the bushes is a deer or your daughter, won’t you get a certain ID before shooting?

Actually, there is no doubt about the humanity of the unborn. We are sure that an unborn child is a human being, and we know this not by religion, but by hard scientific data. The President knows this. If embryonic life is not human, then why does he insist on using taxpayer dollars to harvest embryonic cells? Answer: because they are human. Moreover, human bodies and body parts are extracted from the womb by abortion, not just “tissue.” Finally, it’s a scientific fact that at the moment of conception a new genetically unique human being exists. You haven’t received any new genetic information since the moment you were conceived. Only four things separated you from adulthood—time, air, water and food. Those are the same four things that separate a two-year old from adulthood. We don’t allow the killing of two-year old humans; why should we allow the killing of humans just a little bit younger who happen to be in a womb—especially those at full term?

But the legality of abortion is not the main point here. That’s bad enough, but the President is advocating something even worse. He isn’t just allowing abortion to continue, he seeks to promote and subsidize it through the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). That deceptively-named bill will end the choice of certain doctors to conscientiously refuse to do abortions, and it will end the choices millions of Americans have made to restrict abortion through parental notification laws, informed consent laws, and even bans on partial birth abortion. All of those restrictions freely chosen by the people of this country will be invalidated by FOCA. The President also wants to force taxpayers to pay for abortions right here in America.

Why does he want to do this? Doesn’t he know what goes on in an abortion? I have to assume yes. He’s a very intelligent man. That leaves us with one of two possibilities, neither of which is good. Either he really believes that scalding, dismembering, and de-braining ought to subsidized and increased, or he is willing to champion these things to please his base for his own political gain. The former is madness. The latter is an example of “the ends justifying the means,” which leads us back to waterboarding.

Questions for the President:

Why do the ends justify the means if they protect you with your base, but the ends don’t justify the means if they protect the American People?

Why do you think that waterboarding the guilty is immoral, but subsidizing the killing of the innocent is the right thing to do?

I’m not intending to be uncharitable, and I hope I am mistaken. But it appears to me that this President is willing to subsidize the killing of the innocent to potentially save himself, but is unwilling to simulate drowning on the guilty to potentially save thousands or millions of Americans—a simulation that we have performed on our own servicemen for decades.Share:

All MSNBC hosts and guests were apparently reading "Little Women" rather than military books as children and therefore can be easily fooled about Japanese war crimes. (MSNBC: The Official Drama Queen Network of the 2012 Olympics.)

Given what the Japanese did to prisoners, waterboarding would be a reward for good behavior.

It might be: waterboarding PLUS amputating the prisoner's healthy arm, or waterboarding PLUS killing the prisoner. But waterboarding on the order of what we did at Guantanamo would be a reward in a Japanese POW camp.

To claim that the Japanese — architects of the Bataan Death March — were prosecuted for "waterboarding" would be like saying Ted Bundy was executed for engaging in sexual harassment.

What the Japanese did to their POWs made even the Nazis blanch. The Japanese routinely beheaded and bayoneted prisoners; forced prisoners to dig their own graves and then buried them alive; amputated prisoners' healthy arms and legs, one by one, for sport; force-fed prisoners dry rice and then filled their stomachs with water until their bowels exploded; and injected them with chemical weapons in order to observe, time and record their death throes before dumping them in mass graves.

While only 4 percent of British and American troops captured by German or Italian forces died in captivity, 27 percent of British and American POWs captured by the Japanese died in captivity. Japanese war crimes were so atrocious that even rape was treated as only a secondary war crime in the Tokyo trial, similar to what happens during an R. Kelly trial.

The Japanese "water cure" was to "waterboarding" as practiced at Guantanamo what rape at knifepoint is to calling your secretary "honey."

The Japanese version of "waterboarding" was to fill the prisoner's stomach with water until his stomach was distended — and then pound on his stomach, causing the prisoner to vomit.

Or they would jam a stick into the prisoner's nose so he could breathe only through his mouth and then pour water in his mouth so he would choke to death.

Or they would "waterboard" the prisoner with saltwater, which would kill him.

Meanwhile, the alleged "torture" under the Bush administration consists of things like:

• "failing to respect a Serbian national holiday"; or

• "forgetting to wear plastic gloves while handling a Quran."

Finding out who started the tall tale about "waterboarding" being treated as a war crime after World War II would take the talents of a forensic historian, someone like Christina Hoff Sommers.

After years of hearing the lunatic feminist "fact" that emergency room admissions for women beaten by their husbands soared by 40 percent on Super Bowl Sundays, Sommers traced it back to an unsubstantiated rumination erupting from a feminist rap session.

But the claim was passed around with increasing credibility until it ended up being cited as hard fact in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and on "Good Morning America."

One of the earliest entries in the "waterboarding as war crimes" myth must be this October 2006 article in The Washington Post, citing a case raised by Sen. Teddy Kennedy — and heaven knows Kennedy understands the horrors of a near-drowning:

"Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk."

Even if that description of what Asano did were true — and it isn't — the only relevant word in the entire paragraph is "civilian."

Any mistreatment of a civilian is a war crime. So every other part of that paragraph is utterly irrelevant to the treatment of prisoners of war, much less non-uniformed enemy combatants at Guantanamo, who could have been shot on sight under the laws of war.

What Americans need to understand is that under liberals' own "laws of war," they will invent apocryphal incidents from history in order to give aid and comfort to America's enemies and to undermine those who kept us safe for the past eight years.

*************************

Watching MSNBC Is Tortureby Ann Coulter05/06/2009

The media wail about "torture," but are noticeably short on facts.

Liberals try to disguise the utter wussification of our interrogation techniques by constantly prattling on about "the banality of evil."

Um, no. In this case, it's actually the banality of the banal.

Start with the fact that the average Gitmo detainee has gained 20 pounds in captivity. There's even a medical term for it now: "the Gitmo gut." Some prisoners have been heard whispering, "If you think Allah is great, you should try these dinner rolls."

In terms of "torture," there was "the attention grasp," which you have seen in every department store you have ever been where a mother was trying to get her misbehaving child's attention. If "the attention grasp" doesn't work, the interrogators issue a stern warning: "Don't make me pull this car over."

Farther up the parade of horribles was "walling," which I will not describe except to say Elliot Spitzer paid extra for it.

And for the most hardened terrorists, CIA interrogators had "the caterpillar." Evidently, the terrorists have gotten so fat on the food at Guantanamo, now they can't even outrun a caterpillar.

Contrary to MSNBC hosts who are afraid of bugs, water and their own shadows, waterboarding was most definitely not a "war crime" for which the Japanese were prosecuted after World War II -- no matter how many times Mrs. Jonathan Turley, professor of cooking at George Washington University, says so.

All MSNBC hosts and guests were apparently reading "Little Women" rather than military books as children and therefore can be easily fooled about Japanese war crimes. (MSNBC: The Official Drama Queen Network of the 2012 Olympics.)

Given what the Japanese did to prisoners, waterboarding would be a reward for good behavior.

It might be: waterboarding PLUS amputating the prisoner's healthy arm, or waterboarding PLUS killing the prisoner. But waterboarding on the order of what we did at Guantanamo would be a reward in a Japanese POW camp.

To claim that the Japanese -- architects of the Bataan Death March -- were prosecuted for "waterboarding" would be like saying Ted Bundy was executed for engaging in sexual harassment.

What the Japanese did to their POWs made even the Nazis blanch. The Japanese routinely beheaded and bayoneted prisoners; forced prisoners to dig their own graves and then buried them alive; amputated prisoners' healthy arms and legs, one by one, for sport; force-fed prisoners dry rice and then filled their stomachs with water until their bowels exploded; and injected them with chemical weapons in order to observe, time and record their death throes before dumping them in mass graves.

While only 4 percent of British and American troops captured by German or Italian forces died in captivity, 27 percent of British and American POWs captured by the Japanese died in captivity. Japanese war crimes were so atrocious that even rape was treated as only a secondary war crime in the Tokyo trial, similar to what happens during an R. Kelly trial.

The Japanese "water cure" was to "waterboarding" as practiced at Guantanamo what rape at knifepoint is to calling your secretary "honey."

The Japanese version of "waterboarding" was to fill the prisoner's stomach with water until his stomach was distended -- and then pound on his stomach, causing the prisoner to vomit.

Or they would jam a stick into the prisoner's nose so he could breathe only through his mouth and then pour water in his mouth so he would choke to death.

Or they would "waterboard" the prisoner with saltwater, which would kill him.

Meanwhile, the alleged "torture" under the Bush administration consists of things like:

-- "failing to respect a Serbian national holiday"; or

-- "forgetting to wear plastic gloves while handling a Quran."

Finding out who started the tall tale about "waterboarding" being treated as a war crime after World War II would take the talents of a forensic historian, someone like Christina Hoff Sommers.

After years of hearing the lunatic feminist "fact" that emergency room admissions for women beaten by their husbands soared by 40 percent on Super Bowl Sundays, Sommers traced it back to an unsubstantiated rumination erupting from a feminist rap session.

But the claim was passed around with increasing credibility until it ended up being cited as hard fact in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and on "Good Morning America."

One of the earliest entries in the "waterboarding as war crimes" myth must be this October 2006 article in The Washington Post, citing a case raised by Sen. Teddy Kennedy -- and heaven knows Kennedy understands the horrors of a near-drowning:

"Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk."

Even if that description of what Asano did were true -- and it isn't -- the only relevant word in the entire paragraph is "civilian."

Any mistreatment of a civilian is a war crime. So every other part of that paragraph is utterly irrelevant to the treatment of prisoners of war, much less non-uniformed enemy combatants at Guantanamo, who could have been shot on sight under the laws of war.

What Americans need to understand is that under liberals' own "laws of war," they will invent apocryphal incidents from history in order to give aid and comfort to America's enemies and to undermine those who kept us safe for the past eight years.

************

Muslims: 'We Do That On First Dates'by Ann Coulter04/29/2009

Without any pretense of an argument, which liberals are neurologically incapable of, the mainstream media are now asserting that our wussy interrogation techniques at Guantanamo constituted "torture" and have irreparably harmed America's image abroad.

Only the second of those alleged facts is true: The president's release of the Department of Justice interrogation memos undoubtedly hurt America's image abroad, as we are snickered at in capitals around the world, where they know what real torture is. The Arabs surely view these memos as a pack of lies. What about the pills Americans have to turn us gay?

The techniques used against the most stalwart al-Qaida members, such as Abu Zubaydah, included one terrifying procedure referred to as "the attention grasp." As described in horrifying detail in the Justice Department memo, the "attention grasp" consisted of:

"(G)rasping the individual with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion. In the same motion as the grasp, the individual is drawn toward the interrogator."

The end.

There are rumors that Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney wanted to take away the interrogators' Altoids before they administered "the grasp," but Department of Justice lawyers deemed this too cruel.

And that's not all! As the torments were gradually increased, next up the interrogation ladder came "walling." This involves pushing the terrorist against a flexible wall, during which his "head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a C-collar effect to prevent whiplash."

People pay to have a lot rougher stuff done to them at Six Flags Great Adventure. Indeed, with plastic walls and soft neck collars, "walling" may be the world's first method of "torture" in which all the implements were made by Fisher-Price.

As the memo darkly notes, walling doesn't cause any pain, but is supposed to induce terror by making a "loud noise": "(T)he false wall is in part constructed to create a loud sound when the individual hits it, which will further shock and surprise." (!!!)

If you need a few minutes to compose yourself after being subjected to that horror, feel free to take a break from reading now. Sometimes a cold compress on the forehead is helpful, but don't let it drip or you might end up waterboarding yourself.

The CIA's interrogation techniques couldn't be more ridiculous if they were out of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch:

Cardinal! Poke her with the soft cushions! ...Hmm! She is made of harder stuff! Cardinal Fang! Fetch ... THE COMFY CHAIR!

So you think you are strong because you can survive the soft cushions. Well, we shall see. Biggles! Put her in the Comfy Chair! ...

Now -- you will stay in the Comfy Chair until lunchtime, with only a cup of coffee at 11.

Further up the torture ladder -- from Guantanamo, not Monty Python -- comes the "insult slap," which is designed to be virtually painless, but involves the interrogator invading "the individual's personal space."

If that doesn't work, the interrogator shows up the next day wearing the same outfit as the terrorist. (Awkward.)

I will spare you the gruesome details of the CIA's other comical interrogation techniques and leap directly to the penultimate "torture" in their arsenal: the caterpillar.

In this unspeakable brutality, a harmless caterpillar is placed in the terrorist's cell. Justice Department lawyers expressly denied the interrogators' request to trick the terrorist into believing the caterpillar was a "stinging insect."

Human rights groups have variously described being trapped in a cell with a live caterpillar as "brutal," "soul-wrenching" and, of course, "adorable."

If the terrorist manages to survive the non-stinging caterpillar maneuver -- the most fiendish method of torture ever devised by the human mind that didn't involve being forced to watch "The View" -- CIA interrogators had another sadistic trick up their sleeves.

I am not at liberty to divulge the details, except to mention the procedure's terror-inducing name: "the ladybug."

Finally, the most savage interrogation technique at Guantanamo was "waterboarding," which is only slightly rougher than the Comfy Chair.

Tens of thousands of our troops were waterboarded over the past three decades as part of their training, but not until it was done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- mastermind of the 9/11 attack on America -- were liberal consciences shocked.

I think they were mostly shocked because they couldn't figure out how Joey Buttafuoco ended up in Guantanamo.

As non-uniformed combatants, all of the detainees at Guantanamo could have been summarily shot on the battlefield under the Laws of War.

Instead, we gave them comfy chairs, free lawyers, better food than is served in Afghani caves, prayer rugs, recreational activities and top-flight medical care -- including one terrorist who was released, whereupon he rejoined the jihad against America, after being fitted for an expensive artificial leg at Guantanamo, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

Only three terrorists -- who could have been shot -- were waterboarded. This is not nearly as bad as "snowboarding," which is known to cause massive buttocks pain and results in approximately 10 deaths per year.

At Al-Jazeera, they don't believe these interrogation memos are for real. Muslims look at them and say: THIS IS ALL THEY'RE DOING? We do that for practice. We do that to our friends.

But The New York Times is populated with people who can't believe they live in a country where people would put a caterpillar in a terrorist's cell.

****************************

Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein Obamais aUSURPERbecause he is not eligible to be President of the United Statesbecause he is not a Natural Born Citizenas required by Article Two, Section One, Clause Fiveof the United States Constitution.This is a fact regardless ofwhere he was born (Mombassa, Hawaii, Chicago, or Mars).

He is not a Natural Born Citizenbecause he was not born ofTWO PARENTSBOTH OF WHOM WERE UNITED STATES CITIZENSat the time of his birth.His father was a subject/ciitizenof Kenya/Great Britain at the time of his birth and afterwards.

His mother was too young to pass on her US citizenshipaccording to the law in effect when he was born.

Check it out:http://www.TheObamaFile.com/ObamaNaturalBorn.htm

His usurpation cannot be corrected by Congress,it can only be corrected by his resignation, his removalorby an amendment to the Constitutionwhich will never happen.

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About Me

A Texan who loves the truth and hates the lying, cheating, and deliberate prevarication that characterizes so much of our civic discourse these days.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
RIPOSTE, n. 1. Fencing: a quick thrust after parrying a lunge 2. a quick sharp return in speech or action; counterstroke.
- The Random House Dictionary of the English Language...........
You can contact me by sending an email to me at: leorugiens23@gmail.com